Item Discovery in Chalice Dungeons

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page revision: 01, last edited: 02 Nov 2019

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The Discovery stat explained [by DrAnger90]

Good Hunters, I want to share some insight about the Discovery stat in Bloodborne and our recent findings that give a very plausible explanation on how it works.

I was in the middle of farming small Celestials in Isz to test their gem pool (~900 kills per hour) until I noticed that they dropped way fewer gems than they did before. The only difference was that the dungeon I used before was cursed and this one wasn’t. So we started to think about why this could be the case.

From looking through the param files, it turns out that the Curse rite gives the player a Discovery boost! And not a small one that is. The Curse rite is supposed to give the player 1000 bonus Discovery!

It gets even crazier, since there are unused Curses as well that were meant for cut depth 6-7 chalices but still work when we edit them onto depth 5 dungeons! These “Terrible Curses” drop the player down to 25% or 12.5% hp and supposedly give the player 5000 bonus Discovery!

Both Curse Discovery bonuses are invisible for the player and won’t show up in the characters stats.

I tested the same Celestial farm but this time with a Terrible Curse active, and they dropped way more gems than usual.

►	900 Celestial kills in a dungeon without a curse and 439 Discovery yielded 148 gems.
►	900 Celestial kills in a dungeon with a normal 50% curse and 439 Discovery yielded 342 gems.
►	900 Celestial kills in a dungeon with 75% “terrible curse” and 439 Discovery yielded 670 gems!

A similar thing happened when I farmed some Gargoyles. In a normal cursed dungeon 91/200 items were gems and in a terrible cursed dungeon 140/200 items were gems. These are such huge differences that it can’t be just normal randomness at work.

This discovery made me want to write down a formula that explains this and it seems simpler than expected. In the param files, every enemy has a base value for all items they can drop and if these values are flagged as Discovery-dependent, they will receive a bonus according to the characters Discovery stat. As an example, 1000 Discovery multiplies the value by 10. From this you can simply calculate the droprate of each item from each enemy once you know their base values, Discovery-dependent items and the Discovery stat. Both the Celestial and Gargoyle farms align with what the calculation predicts as can be seen in the following document, together with some other examples.

It also turns out that the Curse Discovery bonus is only granted to the player whenever they wear any number of runes that increases the Discovery stat. If the player doesn’t wear any Discovery enhancing runes, they won’t receive the 1000 or 5000 Discovery bonus in cursed dungeons.

This causes some very weird things to happen. A character with no Arcane investment and only the Milkweed rune equipped (110 Discovery + 1000 or 5000 from the curse) can find way more rare items than a character with 99 Arcane and no runes equipped (209 Discovery). I’ve tested this too with the Celestial farm and it does seem to be the case. If you want to test this as well, I would suggest you farm the Celestials on layer 2 in pf3w3w36 with the 2 different setups I mentioned above. This dungeon has the 75% terrible curse and drops mostly Striking gems.

Therefore I would suggest you would always equip at least 1 rune that increases your Discovery (any Eye rune or the Milkweed Oath) while you’re in a Cursed dungeon to take advantage of this curse bonus.

The unused Terrible Curses are more useful than we thought before, as they will make enemies drop more valuable items. In cases like the Labyrinth Spirit, it will presumably increase the chance for a gem from 55.6% to 82.6% (with 439 Discovery).

We need more farming data on different enemies to test the calculation, but it definitely seems to be in the right direction. One flaw that might be seen is the NPC hunter gem chance, which seems to be higher than we think it should be in a normal cursed dungeon. It might be that enemies that are summoned by special effects like Rotted Rite or other similar effects won’t get affected by the Curse Discovery bonus so their gem chance values stay relatively low.

All of this explains why some people noticed a huge difference in the amount of rare items when they compared 209 Discovery (99 Arcane) with 219 Discovery (99 Arcane + Milkweed), or other oddities when farming enemies in the past. It seems that the players own Discovery stat isn’t really that important, which is surprising. Discovery was always a confusing topic and nobody really knew how it worked and if more Discovery even mattered. I hope that this explains once and for all how Discovery works.

Our discord is the place where we discover all these cool things, come visit us if you haven’t already!